CHARTER SCHOOL DISTRICT OUTGROWING SPACE

Executive director ‘looking at every angle,’ including chunk of city park

Popular charter schools run by Dennis “Coach” Snyder on the northeast side of the city are experiencing growing pains.

“Our K-8 program is growing and in another year, I’ll be out of room,” Snyder said. “Our Heritage Digital Academy exploded.”

Snyder is the executive director of the “Escondido Charter School District,” run under his American Heritage Education Foundation. Charter schools are independent public schools allowed under a 1992 state law.

Snyder founded Escondido Charter High School in 1996 with about 30 students in an East Valley Parkway office building. The high school now has more than 800 students in traditional and independent learning programs. Heritage K-8 Charter School opened in 2003. It has a waiting list of about 800. Heritage Digital Academy, a modified independent-study middle school program, followed in 2004.

“We are, to meet the needs of our community, looking for facilities to expand,” Snyder said. “We’re running out of room where we’re at right now. So I have talked to a lot of different people on what options, what properties (are) out there.”

The space crunch is felt at all three schools, he said. But it’s particularly evident at the Heritage schools, housed in four former office buildings on East Valley Parkway, across from the high school, which was built in 2001.

The digital academy added a ninth-grade option this year. The K-8 has two classrooms for each grade, and has started to add a third. “That’s where we’re running into a facilities situation,” Snyder said.

The office-building structures mean few classrooms are alike at the K-8 school, whose enrollment is 536. Class sizes range from 23 to 28, depending on grade. One kindergarten room is spacious and L-shaped, while another is compact. Seventh-graders in a history class might sit elbow to elbow, while a science classroom is a bit roomier. The rooms may be repurposed from year to year, administrative assistant Leanne Megna said during a recent tour.

The K-8 no longer has a separate library because the space was needed for a classroom, and all the books were divided among the grades, Megna said. One room that houses a second-grade class this year has been the school office, the library, the YMCA aftercare room, and a fourth-grade class over the last seven years, she said.

Megna said the school has to be creative with space, but it hasn’t sacrificed programs such as art, music and physical education.

“Look at what we can do,” she said. “Look at what our scores are with what we have. The majority of our funding goes to our classrooms.”

Heritage K-8 earned an Academic Performance Index score of 897 in 2012; the state target is 800 out of 1,000. In a 2011 University of Southern California study, the school was ranked No. 1 out of 800 charter schools in the state.

When children are in the classrooms, the 4.5-acre campus still looks very much like an office complex. Look closely on the asphalt and you can see painted lines for basketball or hopscotch, but the campus lacks grass and play structures.

“They don’t know any different, so nobody complains about missing playground equipment,” Megna said. “We do get ‘I wish we had grass’ sometimes.”

One property, which is city-owned, that the charter organization considered for possible development would give it plenty of play space. But that property also raised eyebrows when it appeared on the agenda for a closed-session City Council meeting last month.

An undeveloped 13.78-acre area of city-owned Mountain View Park, at Citrus Avenue and Mountain View Drive, was the subject of discussion. Mountain View Park, near Orange Glen High School, has tennis courts, ball fields and playground equipment, and is home to Escondido National Little League.

Snyder said no action has been taken on that property, adding that he is looking at all options, including office space, vacant land, or a joint-use facility that would benefit the school and the community.

“I’m looking at every angle that I possibly can,” he said.

The undeveloped parcels of Mountain View Park are zoned “open space park,” Community Development Director Barbara Redlitz said. Preschools and public elementary and high schools are allowed in that zone, Redlitz said.

If the charter organization is truly interested in the property, “at this time the ball is in (its) court” to come up with a proposal for buying it, Assistant City Manager Charles Grimm said last week.

An appraisal would be needed for the property, and the city would seek fair market value if officials decided to sell it, Grimm said.

He added that whoever develops the property would be responsible for all of the standard infrastructure improvements, such as streets, sewer and water, and “the cost could be substantial.”